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Movie review: Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey plays HIV-infected rodeo cowboy Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club. He lost almost 50 pounds for the role.

Photograph by: The Canadian Press
, Postmedia News

Dallas Buyers Club

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Jennifer Garner

Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée

Running time: 117 minutes

Parental guidance: Coarse language, adult themes, sexual situations

The first thing you notice in Dallas Buyers Club is the transformation of Matthew McConaughey.

It’s a metamorphosis that has been developing for years: the shirtless hunk of lightweight rom-com has slowly become a real screen presence, one whose grit (as a stripper in Magic Mike, or an escape convict in Mud, or a dirty cop in Killer Joe) plays against his genial manner. It didn’t hurt that as McConaughey evolved from sex object to actor, his pecs didn’t suffer any collateral damage.

Now, though, that has changed as well. Playing an electrician-cum-rodeo cowboy named Ron Woodroof, McConaughey lost almost 50 pounds. He is skeletal, a lean good old boy whose moustache and sideburns make him look dangerous somehow, but not in any way that would raise concerns in Dallas in 1985.

Woodroof is sick, but he doesn’t know it. He has been diagnosed with HIV.

“I ain’t no faggot, m-f,” Woodroof tells the doctors who deliver the news. “I don’t even know no faggots.”

Woodroof had reason to be baffled. In the middle of the AIDS epidemic, he has been diagnosed with the disease and given 30 days to live. A raucous, hard-drinking homophobe (“All that fine Hollywood pussy being wasted,” he says upon learning that Rock Hudson was gay), he has now joined the ranks of the afflicted.

Woodroof got the disease from having sex with a woman who used intravenous drugs, but that hardly matters in the world of Dallas Buyers Club. His friends don’t want him around any more, and he is thrown into a world of experimental treatments, intrusive laws and a misinformed public. The rodeo cowboy has been thrown to the ground.

Dallas Buyers Club is based on a true story that could have been played for pathos, but in the hands of Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y) it becomes a raggedy-edged drama about a man who finds a kind of capitalist redemption in adversity. Woodroof is told by doctors — represented by Denis O’Hare and Jennifer Garner — that the current anti-viral medicine, AZT, is not available, and is of questionable value anyway. But he refuses to accept the bad news, first buying it on the black market from a hospital employee, and then going on a worldwide hunt for treatments that the Federal Drug Administration hasn’t approved.

“Screw the FDA,” Woodroof says. “I’m going to be DOA.”

Eventually he skirts the law by forming a “buyers club” that sells memberships and then provides medication to a mostly gay clientele that lines up to get it. Woodroof is a hero to the community, a crusader of sorts, but he’s also a businessman, and nobody gets help without paying first: he’s a sort of Mother Teresa of Wall Street, and watching McConaughey turn Woodroof’s macho charisma to the service of gay health is a viscerally enjoyable experience.

The heart of Dallas Buyers Club, though, comes in a different form. In the hospital, Woodroof meets Rayon (Jared Leto), a flamboyant transsexual who befriends him and won’t let go despite Woodroof’s initial repulsion at the very idea. Rayon, who’s obsessed with the glam rocker Marc Bolan, eventually becomes a partner in the club, and the odd-couple matching gives the movie its comedy and its sentiment.

In one scene, Woodroof meets an old friend from his homophobe days and forces the man to shake hands with Rayon. It’s a rather obvious symbol of Woodroof’s conversion, but Leto’s fluttery dignity — it’s a great performance and another persuasive transformation — makes it irresistible.

Vallée also get a fine turn from Griffin Dunne as Dr. Vass, a down-and-out physician in Mexico who provides some of Woodroof’s illicit drugs. In his scraggly beard, Dr. Vass is a something of a compassionate disaster and a little movie all on his own.

Dallas Buyers Club comes alive in such details. It’s the story of an unhappy time, filled with misunderstandings and easy hatreds, but the movie goes past its tragedies to find hope, friendship and a different kind of courage from a most unlikely hero.

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